Clintonism Craters
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
As the news cascades in from North Korea, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East we can’t help but spare a thought for Old Bill Clinton. No doubt his acolytes will be out trying to make the best of the situation in North Korea and Northern Ireland the way they have been trying for the past year or so to justify their decisions to embrace the Middle East “peace process” begun at Oslo. But the fact is that these monuments of Clinton-era peace making now are rubble.
It is going to be hard to imagine the historians parceling out much to Mr. Clinton and his foreign policy team other than a just portion of the blame.
In the October 28 number of The Weekly Standard magazine, Max Boot argues that the real question is whether these events will discredit the idea that peace comes from a “process.” He thinks not, reckoning that the notion, like all true faiths, is impervious to empirical refutation. The flaw in Mr. Clinton’s foreign policy initiatives involves not only the elevation of process over substance but also the arrogance of the disregard for in-place structures. The rush to Oslo, after all, was a rejection of Madrid. Madrid had been undertaken after a painstakingly principled period of planning by both America and the government in Jerusalem of Yitzhak Shamir. Senator Mitchell’s expedition to Northern Ireland was an invitation to bring in the IRA that all policy heretofore had been rejecting as a matter of principle.
As for North Korea, there are those who spent a generation or two of the Cold War arguing that whatever America might do, it must at all costs avoid precisely what the Clinton administration did. The Clintonites negotiated directly with the Communist regime, rather than insist it deal directly with its free neighbors in the South. This was the venture that resulted in an American state secretary, Madeleine Albright, actually gracing with her presence a Stalinist show that tens of thousands of North Koreans were forced to put on while she was visiting the enemy capital. What a symbol for a failed policy. The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd offered this week yet another column mocking the manhood of President Bush. But the fact is that from Pyongyang to Port-au-Prince, from Belfast to Baghdad, the lesson being brought in today is that there is no cheap way around the idea of holding firm to principle.
